


The Line

by withcoffeespoons



Series: Nixa Shepard [2]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Colonist (Mass Effect), F/M, Gen, Post-Mass Effect 2: Arrival, War Hero (Mass Effect)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-14 07:01:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5734033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/withcoffeespoons/pseuds/withcoffeespoons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Surely, weighed against the fate of the entire galaxy, it was a fair price to pay. (Post-Arrival DLC)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The admiral was still talking, but Nixa couldn’t hear a word of it. Even to her own ears, her justifications had sounded hollow— _ if I could have saved them _ —but she hadn’t even tried, had she?

Three hundred thousand lives.

Surely, weighed against the fate of the entire galaxy, it was a fair price to pay.

But she hadn’t even hesitated.

The Alliance showered their praises, their Star of Terra, onto Commander Shepard, the war hero, the savior of Elysium—but as soon as the lives she saved became hypothetical, they couldn’t stand behind her?

Three hundred thousand lives and she hadn’t even hesitated.

Was that what she was now? The sort of person who could coldly balance the calculation of life and death and choose? Was this some agent of Cerberus asserting itself or was this some element at the core of Nixa Shepard herself—the person her life made her?

Three hundred thousand Batarians and it was one giant leap closer to breaking even for Mindoir, for her mother (MIA), her father (DOA), her little sister (missing, presumed dead—because the alternative made Nixa’s heart cave in). For the Skyllian Blitz and for the Blue Suns on Omega and for poisoning her in Afterlife, for Talitha and every other innocent life chained to a control chip in her brain.

_ If I could have saved them _ —she wouldn’t have even tried.

Three hundred thousand Batarians and she killed them all without flinching. Not slavers, not pirates or thugs, but people—just people.

Admiral Hackett never used the words  _ war crime _ , but Shepard knew how to read between the lines. Maybe it was no less than she deserved.

Three hundred thousand lives closer to matching the Batarians themselves, and she’d do it again if it meant saving the galaxy.

The line between hero and criminal had never felt so thin.


	2. Chapter 2

It had been days since Thane had seen Nixa. It wasn’t always unusual—he respected her space. She often took to herself in the days surrounding a groundside mission. Shepard had a talent for choosing the right person for the job, and often that person wasn’t the master assassin.

But this wasn’t a mission; they’d been between systems, pausing only to scan the occasional planet for resources.

She was avoiding him.

Thane was not an insecure man. He had no interest in taking what time he had left on this shore to doubt, and Shepard had never given him reason to.

He didn’t doubt, but he did worry. Their mission was coming to a quick close, as though a clock was counting down to some abstract end. Shepard’s reclusion was atypical; she was preoccupied. Thane strongly suspected that whatever troubled Shepard had something to do with the solo mission she’d only recently returned from.

“Alliance business,” was all Nixa could say before she left. Her allegiance to her people, to those who had turned their backs on her, was admirable. Nevertheless, Thane was curious. The mission had seemed to go awry, demanding a timely rescue from the Normandy.

Thane knew Nixa. He knew that she needed herself at her best, and knew that she would never admit that she couldn’t always do it alone.

It was a rare twist, he thought—Thane in the position to seek out Shepard in her own quarters. She invited him in at his call, but remained seated on her couch, her back to the door. Her hair, Thane noticed, was still tightly wound, though innumerable strands frayed around the edges of her bun.

As he approached, he recognized the dark-haired figure in the holo held loosely in her hand, an empty wine glass on the table by her feet, her knees curled toward the center of the couch. Thane didn’t see a bottle, but he smelled the slightly stale haze that Nixa would be ashamed to know accompanied her after a night such as this.

She had carried it less after the stirrings of their involvement; something must have deeply unsettled her to send her to her old habits.

“He was infuriatingly kind-hearted,” she said of the man in the holo. Kaidan Alenko, Thane knew. Though the man had been Nixa’s former lover, she spoke of him rarely. Thane had never felt jealousy toward the other man; there was little sense in harboring ill will toward the ghosts of her past. Thane could admit to his own curiosity, however, and in his silence, invited her to continue.

“He always questioned me,” she said. “Kept me level. He’d been through some...darkness. And whenever I’d show even just a hint of that, he’d be there to—to remind me what really matters.”

“What really matters?”

“Things like—” She paused to shake her head, a sardonic giggle on her tongue. “Remembering we’re the good guys,” she finished.

Nixa drained the purple drops from the bottom of her glass.

“Maybe it’s a good thing he’s not here,” she muttered, almost too quietly for Thane to hear. Her eyes snapped to his as she set her glass down on the table. “I hate to disappoint.”

“What happened in the Bahak system?” Thane asked, point-blank. It was something she didn’t want to talk about, but something she needed to. That much was clear.

“That prayer you say—after you…” she trailed off as though looking for an acceptable euphemism for assassination, some coy way to remind Thane that he was a killer.

“A prayer for the wicked.”

“Yes,” she agreed grimly. “Tell me...do you say it for everyone you kill?” She reached again for the glass, a touchstone.

Thane didn’t flinch. “I have fulfilled many contracts, the responsibility for which is not my own. Nor are the deaths of those who stand to oppose us in our mission.

“But for innocents, bystanders and victims of circumstance—yes. Those whose deaths I can honor, I ask forgiveness.”

Nixa stared blindly at the empty glass in her hand. “What if—” Her breath hitched. “What if you were beyond forgiveness?” Her words hissed weakly into the room, her body trembling, teetering on the edge of total collapse.

Thane knew that with a question like that, he couldn’t soothe this ache away with a few words and a lover’s touch, but he reached for her with tenderness. Her tears came thick and fast, under soft, panicked gasps.

“I must believe,” Thane said, “that all who are capable of asking for it are deserving of forgiveness.”

Her glass fell, abandoned, to the floor, rolling softly on the carpeted deck. Nixa tucked her face into Thane’s chest, drawing from his sturdy faith no more than he was willing to provide.

When she could breathe again, she explained in quiet words—the reaper, the Alpha Relay, the ticking clock.

The three hundred thousand Batarians whose deaths weighed like an anchor on her soul.

He let her speak as long as she needed, his soft, dragging breaths filling uncertain silences.

“I, uh,” she said, the halting beginning of stone-heavy dread, “I understand if this is—if you feel like—if you can’t…” The words were too much, too final, laced with fear. She wouldn’t look him in the eye.

“My siha,” Thane said with feeling, “I cannot give you the absolution you seek, but I say this with confidence: _I forgive you_.”


End file.
